Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-2011

Publication Title

International Journal of Nonlinear Science

Volume

11

Issue

2

First Page

236

Last Page

245

Abstract

The occurrence of terrorist vehicular bomb attacks has been frequently reported. Perimeter security barriers are designed and guilt to defeat vehicle penetration. Due to the complexity of designing a security barrier, the current practice is to physically crash test the barrier head-on with a threat vehicle, at a certain velocity as a validation of the design. As full-scale vehicular crash tests are costly, facility designers are often forced to use existing barriers without the benefit of designing new, innovative and cost-effective systems for a specific threat. With the present-day computing capability, conducting three-dimensional simulations of vehicular crash dynamics on a personal computer has become very feasible. Vehicular crash simulations are traditionally conducted using finite element (FE) programs, which require extensive computer runtime. A first-principle approach based on the physics of crash dynamics has been developed to reduce computer runtime. Nonlinear structural responses due to the inelastic material effect and large deformation during the vehicular impact are taken into account. An explicit, step-by-step solution scheme is used for solving the transient dynamic problem. No inversions of large matrices are necessary at each time step in this algorithm. Validation examples using crash test data and data from the literature are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the developed algorithm.

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